It came as no surprise to learn recently that among George Best's favourite songs was Bob Dylan's 'Positively Fourth Street'. Dylan, who also illuminated the 1960s - with genius of a different kind - might have written his searing rant for George.

You could maybe hear the kid from Belfast straining at the limits of the melody, groaning in Dylanesque parody, when it first crackled through radios across Europe in the autumn of 1965.

You got a lot of nerve To say that you're my friend When I was down You just stood there grinnin'

He'd be wearing a skimpy tank-top, perhaps, flares and platform shoes, or Beatle boots, and perched on a stool at the back of a Manchester bar (entered through the rear door). A pretty, mini-skirted dolly bird would be parked nearby, staring into his dark eyes, hanging on his spare, funny words, waiting for a sign. 'Must go,' he might say, 'got to get home.' And back at his digs, before his landlady Mrs Fullaway made his tea, the most charismatic footballer we have ever seen would slip a 45 on to the Dansette.

I wish that for just one time You could stand inside my shoes And just for that one moment I could be you...

Dylan had written 'Positively Fourth Street' just days after being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 for 'going electric'. George's singular brand of electricity was coursing through football as Manchester United closed in on the title - and he was heading in his own direction, too. As he always would.

But even then, at 19, four years into his career at Old Trafford, Best belonged to everyone. And everyone he wanted to belonged to him. They were often blonde, always pretty and forever young. Sooner than George or anyone else realised, though, it would be over. Those who had worshipped him in print would not match the ardour of the women who continued to pursue him into middle-age and his booze-wrinkled decline, every ugly minute of it chronicled with what was, sometimes, unseemly glee.

The moralists were never far away when Best slipped into one of his physical collapses. Few people of fame can have inspired more premature obituaries. In recent weeks, the opinion formers poured over the final moments of his turbulent life. He drank too much. He loved too much. He spent too much. He wasted his genius. He was every good thing gone wrong, a relic from the defining age of excess. And, with his beautiful face and his four-letter name, he was a gift to Fleet Street.

Once, some of the chroniclers had been his friends. Now they found it hard to balance sermonising with compassion. They were careful not to damage his legacy because they knew that, for all his failings, he was universally cherished.

'In the old days,' he told The Observer's Ursula Kenny just before he was admitted to hospital several weeks ago, 'when I first started playing, you used to go out drinking with reporters and they used to travel with you and they were pals and you could say anything you wanted to them off the record and they didn't print it because they valued your friendship. It's a shame the way the whole of this country has gone - not just the newspapers. It's all total dirge and filth.'

Peter Batt, a huge drinking hack of the old school, recalled in his autobiography that one of his editors once told him: 'The only time I ever want to see George Best's name in my paper again is when he's dead.'

Nevertheless, Best rarely said no to reporters. He loved even the unloving. You could usually get him at the Phene Arms, the Chelsea pub that was his second home. Now, though, the smile had left his face. He was tired, old, sad. He had money but was rootless. He had not had what he would call a proper drink in months. Alex, who divorced him in April last year, was in their Surrey house; the Chelsea flat, he said, was not available. So he was staying with friends. Ever the wanderer. The strain was showing.

Where there had long been joy and rebellion in his voice, there was resignation. He had everything, nothing and all in between. Years of emotional jousting and lying to his body had stripped his defences.

'I definitely don't think that money can buy you love,' he said. 'It can buy you affection but certainly not love. Love is about mutual respect, apart from attraction. I don't even think you have to have the same interests. It is definitely something chemical.'

Few footballers - few public properties, for that is what he was from the day he signed for United - had more chemistry. It was Best's misfortune to mix it with alcohol and naivety. 'You can't trust very many people,' he told Kenny. 'In the last few years people I would consider friends have let me down and messed me about, mostly for financial gain. Selling stories. Getting me to sign stuff for "friends" and then having it turn up on Ebay.'

Best knew his worth. But he always put fun first. And football. And, remarkably, it might never have even happened....

Best's father worked in the shipyards and his mother drank too much (she died an alcoholic) and they were glad to see him win his way into a grammar school. Best was not so happy, because they played rugby, not football. None the less, he was brilliant at the handling game. He transferred to Lisnasharragh Intermediate School, where his round-ball skills blossomed to the point where there were few in football, on either side of the Irish Sea, who had not heard of him. Bob Bishop, one of Manchester United's leading scouts, was the man destined to spot him, and the deal was done.

Best was 14 when he arrived at Old Trafford from Belfast with another prodigy, Eric McMordie. Another Belfast cowboy, Van Morrison, was on the rise. Matt Busby was still rebuilding United after the Munich air disaster of 1958. But that didn't stop Best and McMordie, homesick both, going back to Belfast after 24 hours. Best's father, Dickie, was having none of it. He phoned Busby and Best was soon back.

It became obvious, from tea-ladies to hacks, that Best was special. Accepted strictures did not apply to him. On his first-team debut, at home against West Bromwich Albion in 1963, he showed Graham Williams the ball and nutmegged him. He went on to torment the experienced full-back and United won 1-0 to stay ahead of Albion at the top of the table.

Thereafter, United came to accommodate his genius. And his demands. He desperately missed Belfast and, from his early days, got the club to fly him back and forth to be with his family. Not many teenagers of that or any other era could have made such a request.

Best (whose favourite team as a teenager was the floodlit Wolverhampton of Stan Cullis) played 474 times for United and, not unnaturally, came to be umbilically linked to the club, alongside Denis Law and Bobby Charlton. They played together for the first time in the return match against West Brom at The Hawthorns in the spring of 1964, and all scored in a 4-1 win. It became the template of United's rise, leading on to the European Cup. Best, playing outrageous yet effective football, was the obvious successor to Duncan Edwards, who died in Munich, and he would go on to wash away much of the pain from that tragedy.

Best shimmied into our affections in those magic seasons, teasing spectators and opponents with freakish control beyond his peers. He could swivel 180 degrees without seeming to move his ankles. He was an illusionist, nonpareil. Full-backs targeted him, some better than others. Paul Reaney, of Leeds, was one who caught up with him occasionally.

'It was a great feather in my cap to be noted as one of the full-backs who had the most success against George,' he said. 'I was quite physical with him - I'm not saying I played dirty, but I had to let him know I wanted that ball more than he did. On one occasion, he was so sick of me that he turned around and clouted me.

'But the biggest surprise for me in my dealings with George came a few years ago at a holiday camp in Bognor, where I was coaching schoolboy players and he was taking part in a football forum. We had hardly said two words to each other as players, so imagine my surprise when he walked up to me and put his arms around me as if I was a long-lost brother. I couldn't believe it. I said, "George, is this you?"... I don't know - he'd had a few drinks ... maybe that was it.'

It's worth repeating here, briefly, the story recalled in these pages not long ago by Jimmy Greaves about Best on another drinks-related outing. Best was in a pizza restaurant in Leeds, before a speaking engagement. He saw Albert Johanneson, Leeds United's first black player, a wizard briefly but by this time an alcoholic, like Best. George called him in, they got drunk - and, not for the first or last time, Best missed his gig. But he argued he had at least given Albert one more decent night out in what must have been an otherwise forlorn existence.

Greaves acknowledges Best was the king of his time and- much like Best himself - refuses to moralise about alcohol or celebrity. He reckoned that, as with most great players, Best's excessive drinking stemmed not from the game's pressures but the very lack of them.

'I look back at George, I look back at myself, same problem as George, same as Gazza, we all had the same problem... but I think it might have been lack of pressure, for want of a better word, why we succumbed. I think we missed it. I missed it. It wasn't the pressure of playing that made me start drinking heavily, it was probably the emptiness of not playing.'

As for his football, Greaves recognised in Best what marks a few players out as special - instinct. 'I don't think George ever went on the pitch thinking about it. He just did what he did. Gazza's never thought about it. You don't have to. That's why they're players, not managers - you don't think about what you're doing, because you don't need to.'

Best was so often the focal point for other people's lives, generating money, headlines and peripheral celebrity. They made a movie about him five years ago, called Best, and ex-wife Angie, unsurprisingly, had a starring part. 'I haven't been consulted at all,' she said before the release, 'even though it shows my life.' Maybe Angie, beautifully facelifted and living in Malibu, didn't fancy being played by Julie Goodyear. Whatever her complaints, she did not mind using the Best name and she had star clients in Hollywood, such as Sharon Stone and Daryl Hannah, flocking to her 'Best Bodies' club for personal advice on fitness. She wrote a self-improvement book called A Change For the Best

They had met in 1975 when George was winding down his career with the Los Angeles Aztecs and, as ever, he was taken by uncomplicated blonde beauty. They married in 1978 (Best swayed drunkenly at the ceremony) and parted six years later. They gave life to Calum, a strikingly handsome colt who has inherited some of George's swashbuckling habits.

'The one good thing that has come out of being married is my son, Calum,' Best told The Observer. 'The best thing about being a dad? Well, I think it's just the thing that every man wants - to have a son and heir. I mean he's a bit of a lad, but at the same time he's been a great kid.

'The regret I have about Calum, of course, is that when he was young his mother and I were splitting up and he was in America and so I didn't see a lot of him. And then we went through a period when he was about six, seven, eight, [when] we got pretty close. And now of course he's here, there and everywhere... but we do get together in Chelsea.'

They drank together, too, but not enough to make headlines. As much as Best was dragged back to the bottle against all medical advice, he went months without touching alcohol. When he did, it was disastrous for him. He always knew that, and was prepared to accept the consequences.

Here is Greaves's view from an Observer interview last month: 'I'm not going to moralise one way or another except to say he's a man who's made up his mind what he's going to do and no one's going to change it. He's a very warm and kind man. He's decided that whatever time he's got left, he's going to live it the way he wants to. Fair enough. George knows exactly what he's doing.'

Best always adored Denis Law. When he arrived at Old Trafford as a 5ft, 8st 7lb wisp from an estate in Cregagh, he could barely bring himself to speak to the great man. He recalled in his book, Hard Tackles and Dirty Baths: The Inside Story of Football's Golden Era, how he stepped gingerly into the vaunted dressing room, kept his mouth shut and learnt. It took a little while for his natural cheek to emerge.

'As my contribution to the side improved,' he wrote, 'I felt more and more at home. I was "big" enough to even answer Denis Law back, and that was brave for me. When I first came into the side I hardly dared speak to him, and all that Law had said to me was, "How are you going, son?" - accompanied, I might say, [by] a clip on the ear.'

Law was in tears when Best was admitted to hospital several weeks ago. The lingering of his illness did not ease the suffering of those around him. Best always was a fighter, despite his delicate mien. He worked harder than nearly anyone he played with or against to stay super-fit because he knew he was in the sights of every ambitious tackler. He skipped and slid from their lunges, punishing their audacity with visionary passes, impossible goals.

Pele said he was his favourite player. And no more need be said about that. Nine years ago, a flood of compliments fell upon Best to mark his fiftieth birthday - and they all echoed the sentiments of the Brazilian master.

'Unquestionably the greatest,' is how Sir Alex Ferguson viewed him. 'There was simply nobody to compare with him - he had all the attributes. It's so tragic that circumstances led to such an early retirement from the game. He's a nice lad - a genius.'

Paddy Crerand thought him 'a complete one-off', and he cared for him as an individual, too. 'He stayed with my family for a period when he was experiencing some problems. We got on well. It's sad, not only for him but for football. He quit at 27 - he could have gone on until he was 35.'

Tommy Docherty provided another perspective. 'He was such a great player he could get away with almost anything and that was a mistake. He should have been kept on a tighter rein. He had everything when he was at his peak.'

Those are mere technical analyses. What shone through in the testimonials was an appreciation of Best's kind if wayward personality. Malcolm Brodie, the veteran football writer of the Belfast Telegraph, observed: 'I found George someone with great compassion and humanity. I recall him going to hospital with me to see a young fan and presenting him with a signed programme and the jersey which he wore at Windsor Park when he took Scotland apart by himself. He has irritated me at times - but never let me down.'

Best's women ('only three Miss Worlds', not seven, he reminded us), marriages, and acres of wine, the occasional punch-up, the more than occasional kindness... and his football - those are his legacies. For better or worse, as his wives must have heard tremulously, that is what he was. What he is. He is not gone from our hearts for a while yet. Two livers, no World Cups - but what a life.

Best lived in the bigger world. He could not be contained in his pomp and, even hovering near the end, we weren't sure which way he was going to step. 'No Direction Home', as Dylan sang. But never, from the day he drew breath, 'a complete unknown'.

From young rugby star to king of European football

1946 Born on 22 May on mainly Protestant Cregagh estate in south-east Belfast.1957-59 After passing 11-plus exam attends rugby-playing grammar school, Grosvenor High - and stars at the oval-ball game. Switches to Lisnasharragh Secondary where they play football; spotted by Manchester United scout Bob Bishop.1961 Joins Manchester United as a 5ft, 8st 7lb amateur in August. Leaves next day but returns after father talks to Matt Busby. Works at ground and as tea-boy at Manchester Ship Canal Company.1963 Turns professional on 17th birthday; brilliant in first-team debut in September, at home to West Brom - then left out. Scores first goal on 28 December, against Burnley.1964 Wins first of 37 caps for Northern Ireland (last in 1977) against Wales after only 15 league games.1965 United win league; Best a star at 19.1966 Destroys Eusebio's Benfica in Lisbon in European Cup quarter-final, which United win 5-1; christened 'El Beatle'. Opens fashion boutiques in Manchester with City's Mike Summerbee; opens Slack Alice's and Oscar's nightclubs.1967 United win league again.1968 Scores in United's 4-1 European Cup final win against Benfica. European footballer of the year, Football Writers' player of the year, receiving 10,000 letters a week from fans.1969 Busby leaves, United on slide; Best, too. He is 23.1972 Withdraws from Northern Ireland team to face Spain after IRA death threats. Walks out on United - but returns.1974 Leaves Old Trafford in January after turbulent time under Tommy Docherty. Played 474 games, scored 180 goals.1974-84 Plays for Dunstable, Stockport, Cork Celtic, Fulham, LA Aztecs, Fort Lauderdale, Hibs, San Jose Earthquakes, Bournemouth, Brisbane Lions, Tobermore Utd.Records Top scorer for United every season between 1967 and 1972; most goals by a United player in a single match - six against Northampton, FA Cup 5th round, Feb 1970.